


Nothing Gold Can Stay

by cubedcoffeecake



Series: nervous [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Cursebreaker Draco Malfoy, Cursebreaking, Established Relationship, Goblins, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, M/M, Major Character Injury, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability, Post-Hogwarts, but at first they mess up a lot, characters learn how to handle disability
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-04 21:04:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15849339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cubedcoffeecake/pseuds/cubedcoffeecake
Summary: In the aftermath of his cursebreaker's test, Draco and his husband Harry have to learn to live with the situation they find themselves in.sequel to my monthly drabble 'Nothing To Worry About.'





	1. nature's first green is gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ununquadius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ununquadius/gifts), [LLAP115](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLAP115/gifts), [fantom_ftnoise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantom_ftnoise/gifts).



> This is @fantom_ftnoise, @ununquadius, and @LLAP115's faults. Among others, but mostly it was them. Lots and lots of love to @keyflight790 for the wonderful beta!! <3
> 
> Please read the drabble that precedes this fic, and heed the warnings!
> 
> I hope you all enjoy having your hearts broken! (:

The chime of the floo caused Harry to wake with a start. His first thought was “ _When did I fall asleep?_ ” He’d meant to stay up all night, if he had to, to greet Draco when he got back. His next thought was that it was probably Draco trying to floo call the apartment. Harry pitched forward and tumbled off the couch, scrambling around furniture to get to the fireplace as fast as his sleep-heavy limbs could manage.

“Hello?” he asked as soon as he made the connection. But it wasn’t Draco’s face that appeared in the flames. It was some lady Harry didn’t recognize.

“Good afternoon Mr. Malfoy-Potter. I’m calling from Saint Mungo’s Hospital for the Treatment of Magical Mishaps and Maladies. You are listed as the emergency contact for a Mr. Draco Malfoy-Potter. Can you please tell me his date of birth, in order to validate your identity?”

Harry felt like his world had just  _s h a t t e r e d_.

“I--it’s oh five, oh six, nineteen eighty,” he stuttered. The words seemed to come out of him on autopilot. His own voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of a tunnel.

“Very well. Mr. Malfoy-Potter was submitted for an emergency operation at oh six hundred this morning. The mediwitch presiding over the operation has just announced that he is stable, and released the specifics of his condition for review. If you would like to come to the eighth wing of the hospital within the next hour, a mediwizard will come to discuss with you the continuation of Mr. Malfoy-Potter’s care.”

“Of course, I’ll be there right away.” The floo call was ended from the other side. Harry continued to kneel in the center of the living room. Behind him was the couch where they had done so much living--cuddling, fucking, sleeping, eating, talking, paperwork, socializing with friends--in front of it on the table was the untouched take-out. There was still a record in the player. Harry’s novel sat uselessly beside the food.

Everything was useless, none of this could help Draco. Merlin--

How was he still upright? How was the apartment still in perfect order? How was the world not tilting and spinning and unsteady at this news? How was everything still the same?

Draco was now stable. _Which meant he hadn’t been_.

Still not sure how he was making his body work--feeling like he was still kneeling at the fireplace, but no, he was walking toward the bedroom--Harry changed clothes as fast as possible and scribbled a note to Ron. He tied the note onto his owl’s leg and sent her off. Ron would gather all of their friends, get the word out.

Harry flooed to the main lobby of Saint Mungo’s and then broke into a run toward the eighth wing.

* * *

 It was a mix of diluted curses.

They all told Harry that Draco had performed beyond admirably. That there were few cursebreakers in history who could’ve survived the situation he was placed in.

_The goblins had prepared a set up of curses that should have been impossible to survive._

Fatal curses, binding curses, subtle curses to hit your back, secondary weaves to spring on you once you’d frantically untangled the web holding you in another curse’s line of fire, curses to turn you to stone, to ash, to drain the blood from you, to turn your bones to sap, to paralyze your muscles, a thousand different curses to attack the nervous system in a thousand different ways.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t a challenge. It wasn’t created to test someone’s skills.

It was a room set up to kill whoever walked in.

Harry wasn’t sure when he’d begun weeping. He couldn’t remember if it was while the mediwizard listed Draco’s injuries, or if he had held it together until the man had left.

At some point, Harry ended up crying on Ron’s shoulder while Luna held his hand and Hermione sat with Neville pouring over Draco’s charts.

About the time Harry was getting ahold of himself again, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley arrived with George, and Lee, and Percy, and Ginny, and soon after Blaise and Pansy and Greg and Theo appeared. Pansy and Harry started crying, and Ron was quietly updating the new arrivals, and Theo joined the huddle in the corner.

Dean and Seamus arrived some time later, and both Patil twins dropped by on their own time, and McLaggen stopped in before heading up to start his shift in wing eleven. Mrs. Weasley left and came back with food for them all. Fleur and Bill and Charlie had heard and found an international portkey and Draco still wasn’t ready to receive visitors.

After hours--far too many  h o u r s --the waiting room was silent. Half its occupants were asleep. No one was leaving, no one would leave while Harry was still clinging to whoever came close and staring out at the walls as if he expected them to suddenly crack and splinter.

For Harry, the longer he waited without being able to see Draco, the more it felt like he wouldn’t be there lying on a bed if Harry walked through those doors. It felt like Draco had disappeared, was gone, that there wouldn’t be a body and there wouldn’t be closure and Harry would look and look but he would always be split apart, feeling both like Draco should be sitting at home reading while also feeling like he had disapparated and never reached a destination.

( _feeling like Draco had fallen through a veil and never came out the other side_ )

When the mediwizard reappeared to tell Harry that he and the backup emergency contact--Gregory--could go in the room now, Harry was s h a k i n g .

Greg held the door for him, eyed him as if he was just as worried about _Harry_ as he was Draco. Greg walked in behind him as Harry took halting steps toward the bed and

_t h e r e  w a s  a  c u r t a i n  b l o c k i n g  t h e  b e d  f r o m  v i e w._

Harry didn’t know if he was about to faint or scream. There were tears running down his face, his heart was pounding out of his chest, and he felt as if all the happiness he’d ever felt was gone.

While he stood there in frozen terror, Greg edged around him and pulled the curtains away, clearing the view of the bed.

Instead of a scream what came out was a sob.

Faster than he had that morning when going for the floo, Harry scrambled forward until he was gripping the edge of the bed like a lifeline.

D r a c o  w a s  s t i l l  t h e r e. His chest was visibly rising, there was color to his cheeks, his hair was sweaty and matted to his head.

“Draco,” he choked. “Draco, my love.”

Greg put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, and from the way his hand shook, Greg wasn’t particularly okay either.

That was good. The world wasn’t okay. The world wasn’t continuing to spin on as if nothing had happened.

A mediwitch appeared and offered Harry a chair. He could barely understand the words coming out of her mouth, couldn’t follow the hushed conversation she had with Greg, but he heard her say that he could hold Draco’s hand, that they could touch him, and that he should wake up in a couple hours.

Harry pulled his hands off of the bed and grabbed Draco’s limp hand, holding it as tightly as he could.

If he held on tightly enough, Draco would stay here

If he held on tightly enough, Draco would be fine.

If he held on tightly enough, Draco wouldn’t disappear.

* * *

When Harry woke up, he was alone in the room with Draco. Someone had pulled the curtains back closed, but that was okay. He didn’t mind the curtain as long as he was on the same side as Draco.

He was more in the bed with Draco than out of it. His death grip on Draco’s hand hadn’t loosened, but his entire body was now curled around it too.

His eyes closed. They felt swollen. His throat felt sore. He felt light-headed. His body felt like lead. He probably looked like shit.

“You look like shit, love."

The crack his neck made as it snapped up was louder than Draco’s voice had been, but…

“ _Draco_.” Harry didn’t know if he should lurch forward and hold him as close as physically possible, or if he should climb out of the bed and back into the chair, so he ended up hovering uncertainly.

There was so much love and relief in Draco’s eyes that it hit Harry like a punch to the gut.

“I realized what they’d done as soon as I walked into the room.” They continued to stare into each other’s eyes. “My first thought was that I would never walk back out.”

Harry made a choking sound, but he didn’t break eye contact.

“But then, immediately after, I saw you, buttoning up my shirt this morning. And I knew that I _was_ going to walk out of that room. I was going to walk out, and I was going to find you, and tell you that I love you _so damn much_ that I--that I _had to_. I had to walk back out.”

He knew what to do now. Harry shot forward and hugged the man he loved, his partner in life. Draco’s arms were pinned between them, and it was terribly uncomfortable, but Draco began crying and that brought Harry to tears and they both pressed their foreheads together and cried.

_Together._

They were together, and that was all that mattered right now.


	2. her hardest hue to hold

Yesterday, Harry would’ve told you that it was the first day that hurt the most. Not knowing what was going on, the paralyzing fear.

Today, Harry has realized that the difficult part hasn’t even started yet.

After their friends and family had come in, and hugs and kisses and food had been exchanged, and everyone had gotten to see Draco for themselves, most everyone had to leave. Life was starting to move forward again.

Neville and Theo were the last to remain. They wanted to talk to Draco and Harry about what Draco was looking at--not medically, but in terms of recovery.

“They’re going to tell you all of the stuff on this chart, first. Severe burns in several places, but they patched those right up. Bruising, some spraining, a few cuts from all of the weaving and dodging you did. None of that is serious, though.” Harry nearly glared a hole into Theo. “All right, I get it, that all sucks. But it’s healed.”

There was a pause before Neville took a deep breath and looked at Draco. “They’ve been giving us space since you woke up, so I guess no one would have told you. There was permanent damage dealt to your musculoskeletal system.”

Draco and Harry stared at him, a twin sense of dread pooling up in each of them. Draco clung to Harry’s hand, and Harry leaned over to press his shoulder against Draco’s.  He maneuvered himself into the hospital bed so that Draco wasn’t jostled out of his sitting position against a mound of pillows.

“Some of the curses broke through my shields--but none of them were serious,” Draco whispered. “My shield sifted out the harmful components to the curses. All that was left was the binding that held the magic together. It’s dead magic. It doesn’t do anything.”

Neville grimaced and dropped his eyes to the floor. When Harry began to sit forward to demand they  _ keep talking, dammit, what’s wrong-- _ Theo spoke up.

“It’s dead magic, yeah, but there was enough of it to latch onto one of the handful of curses you didn’t successfully block. With that much spare power added to it, the curse took. It took  _ really well _ .”

“What curse?!” Harry broke in. “So something got through besides fire, okay, and it was boosted. What’s it do? What’s wrong?!  Just bloody tell us already!” Draco squeezed his hand and Harry cut off, turning his head to the side and burying it into Draco’s neck. Merlin, he should be standing strong and supporting his husband right now, and he here he was, the biggest wreck in the room.

“It was some form of a muscle liquifier,” Theo replied.

“But… I’m moving without issue?” Draco asked, confused.

“You blocked a good bit of it, they think,” Neville chipped back in. “No one really knows what’s going on, Draco. This has never happened before. Stuff sort of in the same category, but nothing like…

“With all of that neutral magic, it watered down the curse. It wasn’t targeting muscle, it was targeting your ligaments. It’s made them weak. That’s all, really, that the mediwitch said they could determine. Your reflexes are shot--they can tap your knee as hard as they want and nothing happens because the tissues holding your joint together are loose.”

“They’re not too loose for you to be able to move, clearly,” Theo added. “But they are loose enough that it’s going to cause you problems.”

“I don’t--I don’t get it,” Harry said quietly. A glance at Draco showed that he wasn’t really following either. Theo closed his eyes. He looked like he wished that it was someone else telling them this.

“Your bones are fine. Your skin is fine. Your mind is fine. Your magic is fine. Your muscles are fine. You look fine, you’ll be able to go home tomorrow, and you could probably pretend that nothing had happened--for a while.”

“And then what? What happens in a while?”

“Harry, do you know what your ligaments do in your body?” Neville asked gravely. Harry and Draco both shook their heads.

* * *

“Mr. Malfoy-Potter, how familiar are you with the functions of ligaments?” the mediwitch asked straightforwardly. Harry hovered over in the corner of the room. The mediwitch hadn’t liked how obviously Harry was exuding nervousness and had ordered him out of the hospital bed immediately after entering.

“Not very much, ma’am. Our friends said earlier this morning that you would be able to explain that better than they could.”

“They were likely correct, but I’m afraid I, myself, had to read up on the subject this morning. Maladies of the ligaments are neither common nor well known.” If possible, Harry’s nervous fluttering intensified. Draco glanced at him lovingly. His husband was never so afraid for himself as he was for others.

“Your ligaments hold your joints in place, Mr. Malfoy-Potter. In your feet, there are hundreds of bones that stay where they should because of ligaments. Your ankles support your weight and maintain balance thanks to ligaments. Your ligaments hold your kneecaps inside your knee joints, and your hips in their ball joints. All of your vertebrae and ribs are arranged and attached with ligaments. Your hands, fingers, elbows, shoulders, and the vertebrae in your neck going up to your skull are all intricately connected, and carefully held in place by ligaments.

“Tears in ligaments are occasional sports injuries. If you come across someone who thinks themselves familiar with ailments of the ligaments, they are probably thinking of a single instance of trauma to the ligaments of one joint.

“Your friends told you, I assume, that the blend of curses that hit you has caused a laxness of your ligaments?”

“They have.”

“We don’t know why, or how those curses did that.” At least she was honest. “There is no known curse created to do something like this. It’s never really occurred before, according to all of the records that we have available to us. We can only guess at what problems may arise, and come up with solutions to them as they arise.”

“What do you think the general impact of this will be? On my daily life?” Draco asked.

The mediwitch closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. “For the most part, nothing. Your muscles and ligaments work in tandem to hold your skeleton together and move it. From our best guesses, your muscles will keep everything working just like it did before.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Harry asked.

“It means that Mr. Malfoy-Potter is likely to continue living as if nothing was the matter.” She turned to address Draco directly. “Your muscles are used to working with your ligaments. They aren’t supposed to have the workload they now have. You may begin to deal with general fatigue and muscle cramps. Actions like running will be very taxing on your body. Without the ligaments doing their part of the work, the muscles that are holding together your hips, knees, ankles, and feet will tire quickly, and you may dislocate one of the aforementioned joints.”

Draco and Harry glanced at each other.

“All right,” Draco said after a moment. “So, I’m going to need to limit my physical activity? It’ll be as if there’s nothing wrong, so long as I’m not very active?”

The mediwitch appeared conflicted. “Yes,” she answered grimly. “That is the only concrete medical advice I can give you right now. Go easy on yourself--potentially for the rest of your life--and watch out for any physical abnormalities that may arise.” She said the last part to the both of them.

“Of course,” Harry jumped to say, as Draco nodded.

After that, there wasn’t much that the mediwitch had left to tell them.

Draco and Harry wrapped themselves up in each other again, and a few hours later all of the necessary paperwork had been signed and they were on their way home.

“Are you alright?” Harry murmured.

“I feel--it’s like foreboding? But I’m also giddy and feel like a sap,” he added, elbowing Harry lightly and basking in the silly grin that he got in return. “I feel really light, and happy, but I haven’t fully forgotten that I was nearly murdered 48 hours ago, and that I have a harrowing new medical diagnosis.” Harry’s smile dropped and he sobered.

“I’ll be talking to Hermione, Pansy, and Luna as soon as we’re settled back into the apartment. We’ll figure out what kind of action needs to be taken against the goblins.”

Draco nodded in reply and focused on where they were walking. He loved this. He loved walking hand in hand with Harry in a public place, discussing something as one. As one team. Like they were a unit, not individuals working together.

Harry glanced over and couldn’t help but smile when he saw the contented grin that had crept across Draco’s face. The past two days had been hell, but they had pushed through them. They were on the other side, for now.

Halfway down the stairs to wing three, almost at the ground level where the floos were located, Draco’s knee gave out. His leg buckled under him and he pitched forward, down the stairs. If it weren’t for Harry’s grip on his hand he would have tumbled down thirty stairs to the hard ground.

Instead, Harry swung him around and boldly caught his partner. He finally processed Draco’s cry of pain and looked down. Draco’s foot twisted around so far it was nearly pointing backward, while the top half of his leg faced forward.

Both men stared at the dislocated leg in shock, before Harry yelled for help.


End file.
